The Fan Studies Network

Call for Chapters: Transcultural Media Fandom in the Asia Pacific

Editors

Dr Tingting Hu

Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Communication, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University

Dr Fang Wu

Associate Professor, School of Media and Communication, Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Targeted publisher

Hawaii University Press (AsiaPop!)

Routledge (Digital Media and Culture in Asia)

Project Aims

In recent years, the field of fan studies has seen exponential growth in the global academia, with many remarkable books such as the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom (2018), edited by Melissa A. Click and Suzanne Scott, and Aussie Fans: Uniquely Placed in Global Popular Culture (2019), edited by Celia Lam and Jackie Raphael adding to the literature. While the former aims to evaluate the state of the field and comprehensively survey core concerns, the latter focuses on how Australian fandom explores the national popular culture scene through themes of localization and globalization. In the Asian context, Lu Chen’s monograph Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture (2018) has focused on the reception and interpretation of the Chinese audience involving the content of transnational cultural flows in East Asia. 

Previous literature has predominantly focused on media fandom in the U.S. and the U.K., with only sporadic non-Western fandom-related scholarships. Despite popular Asian cultures such as Hallyu and Otaku creating a global impact in recent years, the Asia-pacific continues to receive scant academic attention, largely because the Asia-pacific has long been conceptualized as a geographically vast and culturally heteroglossic ‘other’ to the Euro-American formation (Wilson and Dirlik, 1994). While some scholarships have investigated how stardom and fandom in China, Korea, and Japan influence western countries in terms of culture, economy, and politics, popular cultural exchanges and transcultural practices among Asian Pacific countries still require closer observation.  

This project’s goal is to bring together Asian-pacific-focused media fandom research across diverse disciplines and contexts to assess the state of the field, empirically investigate fandom activities, and point to new research directions. Engaging with a wide array of media texts and formats, this project will be organized into three main sections:

Part I 

Identities, Activities, and Practices 

• the transformative textual practices of fans.
• the transcultural practices and media activities of fans.
• the range of identities that are represented in fandom media practices/activities.

Part II 

Technology, Industry, and Economy 

• the networked relationship between media technology, industry, and fans.
• the dynamics between media fandom, industry, and economy.
• the evolution of media fans in relation to technology, industry, and economy in different cultural contexts. 

Part III

Gender and Sexuality 

• the gendered identities of fans as represented by their media activities.
• the gendered and/or sexual-related practices/issues involved in fandom media activities.
• the fandom engagement with sexual minorities and/or the LGBTQ communities.

This anthology will adopt a transcultural perspective to broaden our knowledge of the complex ways that media fandom develops across cultures and national borders. In the Routledge Companion to Media Fandom’s first edition, Click and Scott (2018) have argued that “The absence of a robust dialogue in fan studies scholarship about race and transcultural fandom is one of the field’s most obvious deficiencies” (p. 241). They have also mentioned Chin and Morimoto’s (2013) call for more attention to transcultural fans and assertion: “… non-English (often non-Western) fandoms are not peripheral to ‘mainstream’ fan culture. Rather they are part of the transcultural interplay of fandom as much as any other, separated only by barriers of language, distribution, and availability that have become eminently surmountable as fandoms have migrated online” (p. 105).

In conclusion, we hope to examine diverse forms of media fandom research in the Asian-pacific contexts (within but not limited to the thematic scope listed above), paying attention to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, and broader Oceania. 

Submission

Please send a 500-word abstract and your CV to the editor at tingting.hu_academic@hotmail.com, wufangwf@sjtu.edu.cn.

Abstract submission deadline: May 1, 2023

Submission of full proposal to the publisher: September 1, 2023

If the proposal is accepted, full chapters would be expected by December 2023.

References

Chen, L. (2018). Chinese Fans of Japanese and Korean Pop Culture. Routledge. 

Chin, B. and Morimoto, L. H. (2013). “Towards a theory of transcultural fandom,” Participations, 10, pp. 92-108.

Click, M. A. and Scott, S. (2018). “Race and transcultural fandom: introduction,” The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom, pp. 241-243.

Lam, C. and Raphael, J. Eds (2019). Aussie Fans: Uniquely Placed in Global Popular Culture. University of Iowa Press. 

Wilson, R., and Dirlik, A. (1994). “Introduction: Asia/Pacific as space of cultural production,” boundary 2, 21(1), 1-14.